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Charter for Budget Responsibility

The right hon. Gentleman is right that we have borrowed a hell of a lot of money, probably too much, since 2010—£700 billion—but does that not give the lie to the idea that there has been grinding austerity? We have borrowed a huge amount of money and struck a balance in trying to maintain welfare. One of the most insidious forms of investment under the last Labour

Administration was the public-private partnership and the private finance initiative, much of which we will be paying off for decades to come—a colossal amount of so-called investment that actually is just adding more to our ongoing debt.